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Jayninn Yue: My Linguistics Story

Bio

Jayninn Yue enrolled in an intro linguistics course at the University of Calgary in the fall of 2010 and was conducting original linguistics field work in the Solomon Islands by the summer of 2011. This is her ling story.

This past year, as a student hoping to pursue a master's in speech and language pathology, I enrolled in several introductory linguistics courses at the University of Calgary to fulfill necessary prerequisite requirements. I had no clue what I was in for. But, as the year progressed, I fell completely in love with linguistics--I started to think differently about sounds, and I started analyzing my friends', coworkers', and family's speech on a regular basis!

This summer, I am spending a couple of months helping a linguist document the different dialects in the Lengo language (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=lgr), one of the many indigenous languages in the Solomon Islands. Because English is the national language, and most people use Solomon Islands Pijin (an English-based pidgin) to communicate with others ouside of the Lengo region (i.e., in the city, for trade), Lengo is under constant pressure to change (though it remains a vibrant language).

Paul Unger, the linguist I am working with, has studied the Lengo language and gotten a pretty detailed syntax structure figured out. However, there are approximately five reported dialects, and they differ in some morphological and phonological phenomena. In order to gain a better understanding of the extent of the differences among dialects, we are conducting a dialect survey. Using a list of just over 200 words (from the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database: http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/austronesian/language.php?id=563) that has previously been used for dialect sampling in this region, we are trekking about the jungle, visiting a bunch of villages, and recording people reading this list of words from their dialect. We plan to sample about 4 people from each dialect, 2 from each representative village. The words from the sound files will then be transcribed, and the transcriptions will be compared across dialects. It's been pretty exciting--I am happy that what I've learned in LING classes is being put into practice!

A quick snapshot of life: It is extremely hot here (anywhere from 30 - 35° C on any given day, excluding humidity!), and we drink rainwater (channeled from the eaves of the house). There are several large markets in the city, where farmers from the surrounding countryside bring their fresh produce every day. So tropical fruits like mangoes, coconuts, papayas, and pineapples are very inexpensive, whereas things like breakfast cereal, which have to be imported, cost a fortune (on average, between $10 to $40 Cdn dollars for 500g of cereal)! The way to get rid of garbage is to burn it; it is common to wake up to smells of smoking plastic, etc., and to see burning piles of garbage anywhere and everywhere along the streets. It is rude to maintain direct eye contact with people when you speak, especially in the villages (which is something I have to constantly remind myself about). As well, there are plenty of roosters and feral dogs about -- they make quite a racket. And there are the cutest little geckoes that stick themselves to the screens on my windows (no air conditioning, so windows are always open) every night, catching the flies that are drawn to the light!